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State board votes to keep minimum wage question off November ballot

LANSING — The state Board of Canvassers decided in a 3-1 bipartisan vote Thursday to keep the minimum wage question off the November ballot due to an insufficient number of signatures. The decision followed hours of debate and a close analysis of specific petition signatures, which a group opposed to the ballot measure said were duplicates.

The group Raise Michigan, which had been seeking to place a minimum wage increase to $10.10 an hour on the ballot, went into the meeting having 1,688 signatures more than it needed to be placed on the ballot, according to a sampling of signatures studied. But after the board decided to investigate reports of duplicate signatures, the board found Raise Michigan was 3,908 signatures short.

Frank Houston, treasurer of Raise Michigan, said he was disappointed in the decision and said the group will decide soon whether to appeal. Ballots have to be printed in a little more than a month.

Houston said this was another attempt by the opposing side to change the rules in the middle of the process.

The first change to the rules, he felt, took place when the Legislature, on a bipartisan basis, voted to increase the minimum wage, but in a way that repealed the previous law that this proposal sought to amend. The group opposed to the ballot measure, People Protecting Michigan Jobs, along with the counsel for the attorney general, made the case to the board that this proposal should not be certified, because it would be asking voters to amend a law that no longer exists.

The opposing group’s attorney John Pirich, with Detroit-based Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn LLP, praised the ruling, saying of all the legal arguments to make, it was simply about math, and Raise Michigan did not come up with a sufficient number of signatures.

Earlier in the meeting, there was wide confusion and disagreement among the attorneys on both sides and among the members of the board, which consists of two Democrats and two Republicans, over whether the board could consider the duplicate signature challenge.

The Department of State staff had examined a sampling of the more than 300,000 signatures submitted and determined there were enough valid signatures to have the question placed on the November ballot.

But the group opposed to the ballot measure submitted to the board Wednesday night evidence of duplicate signatures. The board finally agreed to have the department staff members examine the 48 signatures Pirich and his team found to see if they were duplicates.The staff spent two hours Thursday comparing the signatures and found that all 48 were duplicates, and recommended to the board that the proposal not be certified.

Raise Michigan attorney Mark Brewer, at Southfield-based Goodman Acker PC, repeatedly made the point during the hearing that he felt the board did not have the authority to take the duplicates into consideration.

Brewer said the evidence was submitted well past the deadline for challenges and therefore not something the board could consider.

To determine if a group has a sufficient number of signatures to appear on the ballot, the staff takes a random sample and verifies if there are enough valid signatures.

It does not compare the signatures in the sample population to the remaining total number of signatures, which in this case was more than 300,000. But Pirich’s staff did that, and presented photo copies of identical looking signatures. In some cases, it appeared people signed the petition as many as four different times.